SBDC Resources at the University Library: Useful Library databases
As a member of the general public, you may not know that you have the right to on-site access to Milne library databases and resources. This guide will provide useful links for research, contact information for the Business Librarian, and a summary of res
Reminder
Databases can only be accessed while you are physically on campus and using a public access computer, due to the legal restrictions in our contracts with the companies.
Databases (and what to use them for)
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Regional Business NewsIncludes full text articles from 75 business journals, newspapers and newswires from all metropolitan and rural areas within the United States. Use for keeping up with regional business news, getting a sense for a community, and local business information.
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Entrepreneurial Studies SourceContains full text articles, books, case studies, company profiles, and videos from the academic study of entrepreneurship. Use for finding theories and suggestions for directions to take your business based on studies of actual businesses in the field.
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Business Source CompleteContains a lot of everything, including news, SWOT reports, and academic studies of industries. Use for getting the broad picture of a particular industry, finding scholarly studies of industries and businesses, getting SWOT data on public companies, and for taking a long shot to find data you can't figure out where to look for.
How to use databases
There are a couple of rules that all the databases tend to follow.
- Search using key concepts rather than complete sentences
- For example, don't use "Does advertising on social media drive up sales for small shoe companies?"
- Use "Advertising AND "social media" AND sales AND shoes"
- Put phrases such as "social media" in quotes.
- Connect concepts using AND. This tells the database to find articles containing all of the words connected by AND.
- On the left or right side of each database is a number of checkboxes. These are similar to the filters used in online shopping sites like Amazon: they zoom in on the exact type of product (or in this case, article) that you need.